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I saw an article on reddit about SSH trickery. SSH is a very subversive protocol, able to work around many kinds of unwise security policies. Here’s a couple more useful things to know.

1. Better Lurking Through .ssh/config-ery.

Where you’ve got machines lurking behind other machines, inaccesible from the Internet, you can add a clause like this to your .ssh/config file:

Host: lurker
ProxyCommand: ssh gateway.work /bin/nc %h %p
This causes ‘ssh lurker’ to open an ssh connection to gateway.work, then use nc (may be called netcat on your system, or you may have to install it yourself) to connect on to lurker (the %h %p interpolates the target hostname and port into the proxy command)

2. Reverse Tunnelling

So you’ve noticed the -L option, right, and you understand that by running:

ssh -L 3128:localhost:3128 gateway.home
you are establishing a tunnel home to your proxy server, and you can now configure your web browser to use localhost:3128 as its proxy server to keep your web traffic private.

But did you know this one? Let’s say you’ve got a machine stuck out in DMZ land and you want to apt-get upgrade the poor thing, pronto. You can’t access the web from this box: security policy. You can’t access your internal proxy: ditto. All you can do is ssh into it. Try this:

ssh -R 3128:proxy.work:3128 dmzbox.work
From your shell on dmzbox, you can now configure the http proxy as localhost:3128 and start sucking down packages via the reverse tunnel.

3. Tunnel Tunnelling

Every now and then, you need to get control of a box which is sadly hidden away behind a broken hotel NAT network or some kind of Get Smart style VPN setup. You can’t even get an ssh in. It’s either read Unix commands over an international phone line at 3am your time, or train a pigeon to tap out the following:

ssh -L 2222:localhost:22 gateway.work
which, when run on the remote box, opens an ssh tunnel back home, through which you can ssh back into the remote box with ssh -p 2222 localhost

4. ssh tunnels with tap and -w

There’s also a (newish) “-w” option, which turns ssh into a full-on VPN solution rather than just a port-at-a-time port forwarder.

The useful piece of information which I haven’t seen elsewhere is this: you don’t need to allow root ssh logins to use it. Instead, you can use ‘tunctl’ to preconfigure tun or tap devices on each end with the -u option to set their permissions to a non-root user. The easiest place to do this, on Debian/Ubuntu systems, is in /etc/network/interfaces, for example, in host1:/etc/network/interfaces:

[email protected]$ ssh -o Tunnel=Ethernet -w9:9 host1
And the tunnel will be up and running, without needing to create the tunnel as root. You could easily take this one further for an automatic tunnel, setting

Mac OS X only: If you own Mac hardware, still like to get your Windows on from time to time, and virtual machines just won’t do, here’s some good news: Apple just released Boot Camp 3.1, adding support for Windows 7.

For those unfamiliar with Boot Camp, it’s the dual-booting tool that allows Mac users to install to and boot Windows partitions from their hard drives, and this update gives Mac users looking to dual-boot Windows 7 something to be happy about. Specifically:

This update adds support for Microsoft Windows 7 (Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate), addresses issues with the Apple trackpad, turns off the red digital audio port LED on laptop computers when it is not being used, and supports the Apple wireless keyboard and Apple Magic mouse.